A story on Slashdot notes that Yahoo is now selling one (yes, one) MP3 without digital rights management shackles. The best comment I saw:
This isn’t a marketing ploy to pretend to be anti-DRM when they are not, and this is not being done because they “want to work on other stuff”. This is being done because DRM free music is the only way Yahoo and company can break into the monopoly iTunes has over the iPod, which itself has a near monopoly on MP3 players.
From Slate.com: textcasting.
The text is actually contained in a 15-minute audio file. (It’s 15 minutes of silence, which is how we make the file so small.) Play the file as you would any other podcast, and then hit the iPod’s center button two or three times until you reach the description field, which contains the full TP text. You can scroll through the text using the iPod’s scroll wheel.
The MacBook is out today. It’s a bit more than an iBook replacement; for Apple laptop fans this single detail from the tech specs page says that loud and clear:
Extended desktop and video mirroring: Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 1920 x 1200 pixels on an external display, both at millions of colors.
Finally! Goodbye, unauthorized hacks.
At 5.2 pounds it’s about the same weight as the old Titanium.
Tonight I had to get some data off a Dell Inspiron 4000 that has a totally screwed up W98ME installation. Rather than struggle again with burning CDs from the broken system, I decided to see how hard it was to get at the hard drive itself.
I didn’t have any directions or anything, I just flipped the laptop over and started unscrewing stuff (I’ve done this since I was a kid, but have gotten a little bit better at putting things back together).
As reported at Gizmodo and elsewhere, the MacBook Pro has gotten a speed bump. The original announcement listed two models, 1.67GHz and 1.83GHz. Now, before even shipping the first one (they reportedly start today), those numbers have been bumped to 1.83GHz and 2.0GHz respectively, with a 2.16GHz configure-to-order option.
That makes the top about 18% faster than before; significant, but not exactly exciting (unless you’re easily excited by this sort of thing).
Songbird, an open source would-be iTunes killer, was made available to the public for the first time today. Version 0.1.0. It builds on well-tested open source projects such as VLC and Firefox.
Since iTunes is free, and most consumers don’t particularly care one way or the other about open source, the success of Songbird will hinge on the things it can offer that Apple can’t or won’t. The most promising one is easy access to, and integration with, non-iTunes online music retailers like eMusic.
I’m living happily with my Palm TX, but I’m already thinking about what comes next. (It would be nice to have a multitasking operating system.)
There has always been a lot of overlap between the Mac and Palm worlds. The original developers were Apple refugees. I know this is facile, but as I look at what has passed and what’s been announced for the future, I start drawing parallels between Apple’s operating systems and Palm’s: